It's Been a While

Hi folks.  It's a bittersweet pleasure to come back to Prawfs, which was my first blogging home as an academic.  I joined the academy in 2004 and blogged here for my first year.  I last was on the site as an author in 2005 - October  31 to be precise - the day I left for CoOp. 2005!  Remember? When applications were up, SSRN was new, and blogging wasn't stagnant?

Actually, I'm not sure that last bit is true.  Yes, law professor blogging has come to taken on an increasingly navel-gazing tone - more posts about socks, rankings, rankings of socks, and sometimes lateral moves.  But at the same time, contrary to my predictions, blogs haven't by-and-large consolidated; most of the blogs around in 2005 are still chugging along, and one blog - Volokh - has clearly made a serious, sustained, and substantial contribution to the world in its role in motivating ACA litigation. 

Dan Markel believed in this medium.  Among other things, he was the first to see that junior law professors would want a place to anonymously gripe about submissions and hiring. I argued often -online and off-that Prawfs fora are almost entirely bad for the profession. I still think I'm correct, but Danny was right to see an unmet demand for community across our various, isolated, schools and subject matter specialities. Danny was a connector. Like so many of you, I feel his loss still in missed connections, phone calls, sometimes presumptuous stories, and scholarship.  And like so many of you, I remain astonished by the lack of action in his case. Danny's scholarship was, in some way, about the social costs of crime. It's ironic that his death provides such a clear example of theory in action. Law professors spend so much time on  innocents in jail that they sometimes forget to account for the human costs of crime unsolved. 

In any event, this month I'll try to engage with these topics, as well as those more evergreen: JD/PhDs (good, bad, scam?); skills education (and its relationship with employment); the problem with p-values; and, of course, promoting an article I've out for submission.